Fiction Writing: The Short-Short, Sudden Fiction, and Microfiction

This course is aimed at undergraduates who have taken Fiction Writing 1 or Poetry Writing 1 and wish to further explore the craft of fiction through the medium of the short-short story-a story contained in as few as 25 words (or even fewer!), and no longer than 1500 words, in which plot, character, tone and style are boiled down to bare necessity. This popular (some would say problematic) form has gained a lot of fans in this age of packaged, sometimes frantic blips of information: news scrolls, emails, color-coded threat level warnings, etc. but it also has a tradition and a history in prose poems, jokes, and anecdotes. The short-short forces us as writers to focus on questions and concerns that are applicable to much longer works: how much information is enough? How can negative space be used to tell a story "between the lines"? How can a writer quickly and efficiently get to the heart of a conflict/character/theme? We'll explore strategies for all of the above. The course will focus on reading, writing, and thinking critically about short-shorts.